The Open 2010: Justin Rose enjoying life as an all-American hero

Justin Rose, his name as flawlessly English as his natural diffidence, is
enjoying being the all-American boy.

All-American hero: Justin Rose is enjoying life on the US Tour and has won the AT&T National and Jack Nicklaus' Memorial Tournament recentlyPhoto: GETTY IMAGES

By Oliver Brown

5:28PM BST 10 Jul 2010

Fireworks threatened to distract him last weekend at Aronimink, as the God-fearing people of Pennsylvania unfurled the red, white and blue, but the boy from across the pond stuck to his script – sealing his second PGA tour title in three starts to be hailed as the overnight sensation, spawned on the Fourth of July.

There, perhaps, we should abandon the Englishness theme. Rose, after all, was born in South Africa, lives in a gated community in Orlando, and has settled into an accent unmistakably mid-Atlantic.

But his accomplishment in winning two of the PGA's signature events, in the AT&T National and Jack Nicklaus' Memorial Tournament a fortnight earlier, has made his scalding baptism as a professional seem like a necessary rite of passage.

Rose, it cannot be forgotten, missed 21 straight cuts in 1998, more than enough for him to question his decision to join the pro circus when he had won such affection as an amateur. The world of golf tilted briefly on its axis when, as a gawky 17 year-old, he finished fourth in that year's Open at Birkdale, yet realities of life under the radar proved painful.

Perversely, Rose only qualified for the Open this time through his AT&T triumph, allowing him to top an American mini-money list and seize one of the last few places. Such a last-minute exemption scarcely reflects the degree of his ascendancy this season, but the 29 year-old is in the form to translate his results on the PGA's manicured fairways to the hard-baked links of St Andrews.

Already he has noticed the change in how he is perceived in his adopted country, and the new-found respect for which he has toiled so much. "After the Memorial, I was surprised at how many people were saying, 'Great win', 'great shot'," Rose said, having arrived for a rare foray to Europe straight off his transatlantic flight.

"There are real diehard fans over there – they realise what's going on. By being a British guy on the Fourth of July, I was sensing that they were still pulling for me and I think that came from having been up in contention before. I won the Memorial, and it was fantastic to get that monkey off my back there, of winning in the States. I had won seven times around the world, but this felt like my first win."

He could not avoid a brief aberration, surrendering a four-shot, third-round lead in the Travelers Championship in Hartford, Connecticut and so losing his chance of three straight victories. But Rose's success at Aronimink lay in convincing his American audience that he was not a one-hit wonder.

"I came out of the blocks really quickly in Hartford with a 64 and a 62; I just had a bad Sunday. I didn't really feel 100 per cent couldn't click into a good groove, so that one slipped away from me," he said.

"But I felt like I learned a lot from losing there, which that benefited me the following week. As soon as I got back into the hunt the next week, I felt very comfortable and confident that I could put that one away."

Rose would do well to impart such a mentality on the Old Course to Paul Casey, who, like Ian Poulter and Rory McIlroy, is straining at the leash to secure a first major after Graeme McDowell's US Open glory at Pebble Beach.

Cutting a slightly wistful figure, Casey did not attempt to trump up his opportunity at St Andrews but appreciated, at 32, that the time to make good on his prodigious promise was finite.

"The further on you get, the more you realise that there are only so many opportunities to win majors," he said. "I've always said that my best chance of winning was probably Augusta. Maybe the Open is the most difficult one for me – because, being in the States for 15 years, I got away from playing links golf. I had to relearn how to hit the ball high.

"On an Open course you have so many options and sometimes I used to get stuck trying to choose the right one. You have to be so disciplined. So I sometimes find links golf the trickiest challenge. And yet the Open Championship is the one I want the most."